54. For an insightful approach to ideological despotisms, see Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1994). I examined the relationship between ideology and terror in Leninist regimes in my book The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Daniel Chirot's review essay on The Black Book can be found in East European Politics and Societies 14, no. 3 (Fall 2000).
55. V. I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), p. 11.
56. Vyshinsky quoted in Stéphane Courtois, in “Crimes, Terror, Repression,” his conclusion to The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 750.
57. For this argument and Arendt's quote, see Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1-2 (1997): 338.
58. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
59. Andrei Oisteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006).
60. E. A. Rees Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin Revolutionary Machiavellism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 99.
61. Fyodor Dostoyevski, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, intro. Joseph Frank (New York: Knopf, 2000). One of the characters in the novel became the symbol of a mentality often referred to as shigalyovshchina, described by noted Dostoyevsky scholar Joseph Frank as “social-political demagogy and posturing with a tendency to propose extreme measures and total solutions” (p. 727). Needless to add, for many critics of Bolshevism, Lenin was an emblematic exponent of this mindset.
62. E. A. Rees, Political Thought, p. 132.
63. Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics,” p. 52.
64. Michael Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” New Republic, December 20, 1999, p. 41.
65. I am responding here to some observations made by Hiroaki Kuromiya in his review article “Communism and Terror,” Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 1 (January 2001): 191-201. I consider that his conclusion that “the issue of terror will remain important, it will no doubt be studied merely as part (if a central part) of a larger episode in world history” needs one caveat. Communism is indeed part of a larger framework in world history, that of the ascendance of radical evil, in our times as man fell victim to statolatry (Luigi Sturzo), when the ends superseded any considerations about the means, when human beings became superfluous. Communism did generate consequences not produced by any other revolution or terror, besides the Fascist one. This is a point consistently overlooked in other reactions to the Black Book, such as Ronald Grigor Suny, “Obituary or Autopsy? Historians Look at Russia/USSR in the Short Twentieth Century,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 303-19; or Ronald Aronson, “Communism's Posthumous Trial,” History and Theory 42, no. 2 (May 2003): 222-45. One can try and situate in the same category the genocide in Rwanda and that in Ukraine (as Aronson does), just for the sake of a Manichean capitalism versus Communism polarity, but it is hardly knowledge-productive. One can argue about terror as an epiphenomenon of specific historical circumstances (civil war, famine, capitalist offensive, etc., as Suny does), but the criminal nature of the Soviet regime lay bare from its inception (e.g., in the RFSR 1918 Constitution).
66. Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell,” New York Times, December 22, 1997, A27.
67. See Rigoulot and Yannakakis, Un pavé dans l'histoire.
68. Personal conversation with Annette Wieworka, Washington, D.C., November 13, 2010. I also discussed extensively these issues with Stephane Courtois at the Sighet, Romania, Summer School on the “Memory of Communism,” June 2009.
69. Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 402 and 406.
70. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 462.
71. Christopher R. Browning and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Frameworks for Social Engineering. Stalinist Schema of Identification and the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 262.
72. Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key: The Communist Case of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 175.
73. See Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell.” Amir Weiner also makes an excellent point on this issue: “When Stalin's successors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the Allies liberated the Nazi death [concentration] camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution.” See Amir Weiner's review of the Black Book of Communism in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 450-52.
74. Ian Kershaw, “Reflections on Genocide and Modernity,” in In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), pp. 381-82.
75. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 470.
76. Stéphane Courtois, “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism,” in The Black Book, p. 23.
77. Jeffrey Herf, “Unjustifiable Means,” Washington Post, January 23, 2000, pp. X09. Herf, however, adds an important caveat to his argument (one stressed by other scholars discussing the Black Book): the crimes of Communism were a constant focus of scholarship and of official discourse during the Cold War, while the Holocaust intensively preoccupied academia and the public only starting in the 1970s.
78. Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” p. 41.
79. “Vilnius declaration of the OSCE parliamentary assembly and resolutions adopted at the eighteenth annual session” (Vilnius, June 29 to July 3, 2009), http://www.oscepa.org/images/stories/documents/activities/1.Annual%20Session/2009_Vilnius/Final_Vilnius_Declaration_ENG.pdf. The Prague Declaration and the OSCE Resolution are hardly singular. Other official, pan-European or trans-Atlantic documents have been made to condemn the criminality of Communism and Stalinism following the example of the criminalization of Fascism and Nazism, for example, the EU Parliament resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism or the building of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. This monument was dedicated by President George W. Bush on Tuesday, June 12, 2007. June 12 was chosen because it was the twentieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's famous Brandenburg Gate speech. See http://www.globalmuseumoncommunism.org/voc.